Even Happier than the Democrats
GEDMIN, JEFFREY
Even Happier than the Democrats Europeans greet the election news with glee. by Jeffrey Gedmin Berlin I recall a friendly dinner party in Bonn while Ronald Reagan was president. As usual, I was...
...So I had to laugh when the German media later eulogized Reagan as the man who helped bring down the Berlin Wall...
...On the last evening of the summit, Czech president Vaclav Havel kindly invited our conference participants to attend a state dinner at Prague Castle...
...I'd like to say these over-the-top opinions reflected only the company I was keeping, but these sentiments were pretty mainstream at the time...
...The president read Gaddis's critique of the president's foreign policy—imagine that, the president reads!—and invited Gaddis by for a chat before the beginning of his second term...
...Question one: Would a victory for Democrats in the midterm elections mean voters are repudiating Bush's neoconservative policies...
...I cannot think of a single European I know who will admit publicly that he likes the president of the United States...
...French author Bernard-Henri Levy, yearning for that "better" America, wrote recently that midterm elections might overturn the 2000 and 2004 victories of the "'moral values' maniacs...
...But, of course, even with Democrats controlling the House and the Senate, it ain't gonna happen...
...An Austrian editor once explained to me that transatlantic tensions often resulted from the fact that the United States has double standards, "while we," he added, "have none...
...Simultaneously, they more or less acknowledged that Bush has forever changed the conversation about democracy and the Middle East to the benefit of humankind...
...or their faces go blank because they don't quite understand the anecdote...
...And so on...
...Of course, there are policy differences...
...countries who signed the thing have been having trouble complying with their own obligations...
...And so my simple theory: Bush's greatest sin in the eyes of Europeans is that he is too American...
...policies, is neoconservatism utterly bankrupt...
...If I tell this story to Europeans, and I've done so several times, they either look disgusted (as in—"how unsophisticated, how unstatesmanlike...
...I would be rich if I had a euro for every time someone in Europe has asked me about American hypocrisy, such as the time in the 1980s when the United States supported Saddam Hussein against the mullahs of Iran...
...But then again, nearly everybody thought Saddam was hiding WMD and no one runs around screeching that the Clinton administration lied or that Germany's Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer is a monster...
...But when European commentators say they are still yearning for an end to American unilateralism, moral crusades, and the influence of "fundamentalist evangelicals," what they really mean is that they are longing for a United States just like secular, post-national, consensus-seeking, Social Democratic Europe...
...But how can you explain so More than two hundred Socialist members of the European Parliament have praised the election result as "the beginning of the end of a six-year nightmare for the world...
...He's morality and muscle...
...I keep wondering why people find so much pleasure in hating this president and what he represents...
...Love him or hate him, the story suggests that Bush is a real mensch...
...The president recognized this fellow, greeted him warmly and, turning on a dime, said to the French president standing nearby, "Hey, Jacques, I want to introduce you to a friend of mine...
...I get the feeling that when Europeans say they really like Americans, they tend to mean those who seem most like European Social Democrats, and even then they airbrush out inconvenient details like the fact that Bill Clinton favored the death penalty, that Hillary voted for the Iraq war, or that John F. Kennedy, that suave and promiscuous East Coast liberal, was also a staunch anti-Communist who frequently quoted from Scripture in his speeches...
...He's patriotism and self-confidence...
...It's the idealism thing in American foreign policy that trips our European friends up...
...He is said to have gotten ideas from Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis...
...much heavy breathing about Bush and Kyoto, for example, when nearly all Democrats in the Senate, John Kerry included, had already rejected the treaty by the time the current president arrived...
...The president then took a short walk with this Democratic adviser, asking along the way about advice for new exercise equipment for the White House...
...You get the feeling sometimes that our European partners would be happier if we chucked our human rights concerns and, for the sake of consistency, stuck to pure realism...
...One of our participants was a Gore adviser, who went up to the president at dinner and introduced himself...
...If I tell a group of Americans this story, they tend to be impressed...
...He's religion and piety...
...In the end, my Democratic colleague was charmed by the warmth and down-to-earth quality of his encounter with the commander in chief...
...I have a theory...
...As for the president, George W. Bush learned from experience and toned down some of the unnecessarily harsh rhetoric of his first term...
...Question two: In light of failed U.S...
...As usual, I was on the defensive...
...Now he's fired Donald Rumsfeld...
...Hey, let's not get carried away," he said "and condemn all Americans just because of this cretin in the White House...
...George W. Bush is the full package of everything that makes Europe squirm...
...He is anti-elitism...
...He is rather like that dreaded American animal, the "neoconservative...
...By the way, 15 E.U...
...Chirac, Blair, Schroder, all the leaders from NATO countries were there...
...More than two hundred Socialist members of the European Parliament have praised the result as "the beginning of the end of a six-year nightmare for the world...
...Will George W. Bush ever get his due...
...Joy has spread across Europe over the midterm elections...
...He is undiluted Americanism...
...The other guests were piling on—"Reagan is a cowboy, a warmonger, an idiot-actor"—when suddenly a German guest decided he had heard enough...
...Bush is bad, goes the mantra: bad for human rights, bad for the environment, bad for world peace, you name Jeffrey Gedmin is director of the Aspen Institute Berlin and writes a regular column for Die Welt...
...Several years ago, I helped convene a conference in Prague in parallel to a NATO summit going on at the same time...
...On Iraq, maybe things would have been different if we had found weapons of mass destruction...
...I sat with a group of left-wing Haaretz journalists in Tel Aviv recently, all of them deploring stupid Bush's disastrous foreign policy...
...So was President Bush...
...Talk about a fixation...
...I gave an interview recently to the German weekly magazine Stern...
...He made the Europeans feel good by letting Germany, France, and Britain take the lead on Iran...
Vol. 12 • November 2006 • No. 10
